A number of techniques are known for searching and retrieving answers to questions of interest. Providers of traditional internet search technologies maintain web sites that offer keyword-based searching, where a user enters one or more terms relevant to a particular question in Boolean format and the search engine provides links to content items that are pertinent to the particular keywords that the user supplies. This technology is limited in that, often times, links that the search engine retrieves only marginally relate to the original question that the user is posing. Additionally, the user must sort through a large and often overwhelming result set, web pages or content items to identify potentially useful information to answer their questions.
Certain content providers maintain web sites that function as online encyclopedias or information repositories, for example, Wikipedia.org. Systems such as wikipedia are enhanced by the collaborative efforts of its user-base, which provide content for a plethora of topics of interest. As of September 2007, wikipedia had approximately 8.29 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.41 billion words. Wikipedia articles are written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, with the vast majority of articles editable by any user with access to the system. Due to the open nature of Wikipedia, however, critics question its reliability and accuracy. Furthermore, some criticize the system for its susceptibility to vandalism and false or unverifiable information, bias and inconsistencies, as well as for favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process. Finally, a user must sort through individual articles to find a topic most relevant to his or her specific question, as well as extract an answer on their own with the ultimate goal of simply wanting to answer their question.
Still other content providers maintain web sites that return links to questions and corresponding answers in response to a natural language query by a user. For example: Yahoo! Answers is a website that provides a community-driven knowledge market that allows a user to ask questions of other users as well as answer questions that other users are posing. A given user may either post a new question or input the question as a search string, which is compared to a database of previously asked-and-answered questions. The site provides members with the chance to earn points as a way to encourage participation; Yahoo! Answers contains contained 65 million answers to more than 7 million questions as of November 2006. This site, however, is limited in that many questions contain more than one correct answer and there is insufficient context to interpret the more helpful or meaningful answers from the total number of answers available for any given question. Additionally, questions that are similar in scope and content to other questions already answered, but comprising a disparate word form, may be difficult for a user to locate or review in answering their questions.
Currently available systems have drawbacks in that they only address a piece of an overall solution for providing an efficient and useful question and answer platform. While traditional search providers and online encyclopedias offer links to well-indexed portions of the available informational content on the World Wide Web, they are lacking in the ability to provide narrowly tailored answers to specific questions. For example, while Yahoo! Answers provides narrowly tailored answers to specific questions, it suffers from a lack of quantity and quality in the total available content and does not provide context to help a user interpret an answer to a specific question.
In order to overcome shortcomings and other problems associated with existing apparatuses and techniques for searching and retrieving answers to questions, embodiments of the present invention provide systems, methods, and computer readable media for asking questions, searching and retrieving answers to such questions, and presenting a user-generated content style framework to display quality answers to such questions.